Steelseries Simraceway SRW-S1 out now

Wheels? Where we're going we don't need wheels. At least, not in the traditional sense of bolting a giant steering column to your desk and planting huge metal pedals beneath your chair.

Steelseries' new Simraceway SRW-S1 is a motion sensitive controller which works like the one that came with Mario Kart for the Wii, but has enough buttons to keep even the simmiest of driving sim fans happy.

Currently available in the US only, the Simraceway has 15 buttons, three mode dials, a D-pad and four rear paddles for manual gear changes, accelerate and brake. Thankfully, give that means there's more controls in about four square inches than most cars have on their entire dash, Steelseries reckons that it has preconfigured set-ups for most games built into the driver.

That's the software, not the cockpit jockey, of course.

At $119.99 it's not cheap and no amount of customisable buttons can make up for the inevitable loss of real force feedback that a 'real' steering column has. As a flat (or 'apartment' for international audiences) dweller whose had to sacrifice peripheral space for parenting in recent years, though, I really like the look of the SRW-S1. So long as the floating feeling of an unsupported wheel isn't too weird, it might make it onto a Christmas list.